On the sundial trail in Oxford

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What is it about sundials? Put “sundial walks” into Google and routes and suggestions pop up from Glamorgan to Cambridge, from the City of London to Barrow-upon-Soar. People seem to love the dials because they are beautiful, practical, often intricate things, but also because they make perfect markers for a journey of discovery around certain cities and towns: children love looking for them and adults like finding out about them.

A sundial is simply a face – vertical, horizontal, curved – marked with the hours of the day and graced with a pointer, or gnomon, which casts a shadow. As the earth moves around the sun the shadow falls on the markers and the viewer can tell the time. This used to be how you set your clock. Simple.

Behind that bald explanation lurks a world of fiendish complexity – meridians, equinoxes, equations, angles, degrees and spinning planets – a world that fascinates David Harber, who has been making sundials for 20 years in an Oxfordshire village. Six of his sundials are in Oxford itself and he has come to know the other dials that dot the university city, many of them tucked away in its colleges. So when he agrees to devise an Oxford sundial tour for Telegraph readers to follow just as the clocks change, I ask to go along too.

It is vacation time and the city is sleepy, despite the tourists. We stroll along the narrow lane from Christ Church, the college founded by Cardinal Wolsey in 1524, to the even older Corpus Christi next door, as the sun flings harsh outlines of walls and finials onto the pavement. Most colleges offer respite in the form of a gateway or porters’ lodge, then the blinding light of a quadrangle. Corpus Christi’s quad is paved and right in the middle, eyed by grotesques on the creamy walls around, is a stone column covered in quaint abbreviations and topped by a golden pelican sitting on a ball of stone.

This is a “shepherds’ dial” – David points out a discreet gnomon high up on the column, as if a pair of brass compasses have been embedded in the stone – and above it what looks like a four-faced clock, but is in fact four separate sundials. Above that, things get more elaborate still. “Do you see the pelican pecking its own breast?” he asks, “That’s a familiar Christian symbol of self-sacrifice – feeding its young with its own blood – and Corpus Christi means Body of Christ, of course. But it’s sitting on an armillary sphere”.

Armillary spheres are hollow frameworks of rings – elegant marriages of art and science, invented by the Greeks to show what they believed to be the planets circling the earth – and the pelican is indeed sitting on one, as if it is hatching a giant golden egg. Equations and numbers represent everything from term times and holy days to the mysterious Equation of Time. I can’t begin to explain this. It’s the way you work out the difference between time told by the sun and the uniform time we need so we all catch trains at the right time. It is often expressed as a sinuous, etiolated figure of eight.

To be honest, I don’t really care. I am more interested in the fact that when a chap called Turnbull erected this sundial, Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne and Francis Drake had just been knighted for circumnavigating the globe. I also find it hilarious that we are immediately running late, like a sundial in February – about 14 minutes slow, before you correct it with the Equation of Time – partly because David is looking at each dial with a craftsman’s eye and partly because he is trying (and failing) to make me understand the universe.

There is so much to see that we get slower and slower, our speed marked by sundials like passing road signs: the severe dial carved into an east-facing buttress of Merton Chapel – it only works in the mornings so they built a west-facing version in nearby Fellows’ Quad – or the sumptuous circular stone dial high on All Souls’ library, allegedly designed by Christopher Wren. This is a beauty: it has delicate gilding, the college arms of a red chevron and three roses, a fine iron gnomon and a fat little cherub on top. It also has a very jolly porter in attendance, who explains that it was so accurate that clockmakers used to come to set their own mechanisms by it. It was moved – moving a sundial is like replanting a shrub, it’s never the same afterwards – at the request of a college benefactor, so will never tell the time as it was intended.

At the bottom of All Souls’ dial it says in Latin “[The hours] pass and are set down to our account”. In St Edmund (“Teddy”) Hall, a cheery design in honour of the Queen’s 1953 coronation reads “By the Grace of Elizabeth II/I cannot know the hours unless fine”. “Mottos are often the voice of the sundial,” explains David, “They were imbued with a sort of ethereal wisdom and often sound authoritative, because people were seeking inspiration from Heaven”.

We potter in and out of quads in Brasenose, Lincoln and New Colleges, seeking inspiration, chatting to porters and being admonished by mottos. We peer through a gate at one of David’s sundials on Magdalen Auditorium, with the familiar figure of eight and the letters MM signifying Mary Magdalen, the college’s saint, and the Millennium – in Roman numerals – it was built to mark.

My favourite sundials are in the Bodleian Library and Balliol College. The Bodleian’s Convocation House was once the highest legislative body of the University and housed Charles I’s counter-parliament during the Civil War. Glowing above its dark panelling are two rare window dials; a rectangle of primrose glass dusted with faint Roman numerals and a dragonfly, signifying the brevity of time, and a side window with a sprig of flowers and a Brimstone butterfly. The gnomons, says the guide, would have been outside.

At Balliol is another work of David’s, a sun and moon dial unveiled in 2009 to mark the 30th anniversary of the admission of women to the college. It is a dazzling ball of marine-grade stainless steel, scored with lines and inscribed with a mirror-writing motto – “About Time”, it says tartly – submitted by one of the female students. The former Master’s wife helped commission it and came to show us around. “At night it’s absolutely beautiful,” she says, “It reflects the lights from the students’ windows. It gives me a thrill every time I see it”.

We end up in the robustly traditional Museum of the History of Science – once home to the Ashmolean collection – to spend a happy time browsing cabinets housing sundials, spheres and astrolabes. I have long since stopped pretending I understand the science – but what a great excuse for a walk.

Walk this way...

1. Use the St Aldate’s entrance to Christ Church College (01865 276492; chch.ox.ac.uk). The sundial is on the way out of Peckwater Quad, en route to the Canterbury Gate. Note that Christ Church Cathedral runs on Oxford time, five minutes and two seconds behind GMT; 6pm Evensong actually takes place at 6.05pm. Admission: adults £3.50-£8, children £3.50-£6.50, depending on the month and how much of the college is open.

2. Walk straight along Merton Street and turn right into Corpus Christi (01865 276700; ccc.ox.ac.uk), . The Pelican (or Turnbull) Dial is in the Front Quad. Open 1pm-5pm or dusk daily. Admission: free.

3. Turn right on Merton Street and right into Merton College (01865 276310; merton.ox.ac.uk). Turn right inside the main gate for the chapel dial, the other is on the east wall of Fellows’ Quad. Open weekdays 2-5pm or dusk; weekends 10am-5pm or dusk. Admission: £2.

4. Continue along Merton Street, bending left past the Exam Schools, cross the High, turn right then left on Longwall Street and cross to see through the gate the dial on the south-facing wall of Magdalen Auditorium.

5. Back on the High Street turn right, right again onto Queen’s Lane and right into St Edmund Hall (01865 279000; seh.ox.ac.uk). The blue, white and gold sundial is on the north wall of the quad. Open 10am-4pm. Admission: free.

6. Walk up Queen’s Lane and New College Lane to New College (01865 279500; new.ox.ac.uk). The 1999 dial is on the Muniments Tower (see the “sundial cam” on the college website). Open 11am-5pm, March-October. Admission: adults £3.

7. Follow New College Lane to Catte Street, turn left then right into the Bodleian Library (01865 277162; bodleian.ox.ac.uk). The 60-minute Standard Tours (£6.50, no under 11s, four daily and three on Sundays) include Convocation House and its two painted window dials.

8. Continue down Catte Street and turn left to look through the iron gate into All Souls College (01865 279379; all-souls.ox.ac.uk). You can see the sumptuously decorated sundial high on the Codrington Library wall in the North Quad. Entry via the High Street entrance from 2pm-4pm on weekdays, but sometimes the college is closed so check first.

9. Cross Catte Street and Radcliffe Square to Brasenose College (01865 277830; bnc.ox.ac.uk), open afternoons (times vary), £1.50. The very jolly rectangular blue 1719 sundial is on the right in the main quad.

10. Turn left out of Brasenose, left on Brasenose Lane and left on Turl Street into Lincoln College (01865 279800; linc.ox.ac.uk), 2pm-5pm, free. The World War II memorial sundial is on the north wall of Chapel Quad.

11.Turn right on Turl Street and cross Broad Street diagonally left to Balliol College (01865 277777; balliol.ox.ac.uk), 10am-4.30pm or dusk, adults £2, concs £1. David’s armillary sphere is in Garden or Back Quad.

12. Re-cross Broad Street, making diagonally left towards the bearded heads on columns, to the Museum of the History of Science (01865 277280; mhs.ox.ac.uk), which has a remarkable collection of armillary spheres, astrolabes and other time-measuring instruments. Its exhibition on timepieces, 'Time Machines', runs until April 15. Admission: free.

Telephone ahead to check that colleges will be open. Groups should contact the porters’ lodge first. Last entry is usually 15-30 minutes before closing time.

Further information

David Harber is holding open days at his workshop in Aston Upthorpe, Oxfordshire next Friday and Saturday, March 30-31 (01235 859300; davidharber.co.uk).

The British Sundial Society (sundialsoc.org.uk) has a superb sundial explanation by Tony Moss.

There are worldwide sundial walks – including Oxford, with a different selection of dials – on Sundials on the internet (sundials.co.uk).

Oxford Sundials by Margaret Stanier can be bought from the BSS website for £6.50 plus p&p and includes some further-flung sundials.

For details about other attractions in Oxford, and where to stay and eat in the city, see our Oxford city break guide